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Making Progress Through Austerity

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There can be little doubt that these are relatively tough times in the UK, and the minds of many are focussed on how best to make progress when it feels like everything is being cut.

But most of those who are thinking about it are the professionals, who control budgets for the delivery of services or front-line service providers trying to figure out how to stop things getting dangerous as they are stretched further and further.  The assumption is that the job remains to be done, that they are the ones to do it, and they need to figure what they are going to do to make the best adjustments that they can.

But supposing they took a different tack?  Suppose they invited citizens in to explore the challenges that they face and how they might be met, how ordinary citizens might be able to use their resources, time, knowledge, skills and sometimes perhaps cash, to help?

So, for example, we might

  • invite citizens to explore issues around poverty in an area, and what they might be able to do about it.  And we might end up with something like Disrupting Poverty in Leeds
  • ask people to think about what they can do about empty properties in Leeds and end up with something  like Empty Homes
  • ask residents to explore how they can make a city more playful and end up with something like Playful Leeds

What might happen if we asked local people to step up and see what they might be able to do about other issues facing them, their loved ones and their neighbours like:

  • dementia care
  • sports development
  • fostering
  • elderly care
  • crime reduction
  • economic development and supporting start-up businesses
  • educational attainment
  • resettlement of offenders
  • suicide reduction
  • mental health promotion
  • and so on….

Or  we can just bundle these issues up into performance related contracts, attach our 56 pages of terms and conditions, develop it into a multi-million pound contract and pump it through the procurement process?

How might this work out at a local level?

I watched a community psychiatric nurse, working with a third sector service provider, planning home help for an elderly gentleman in the early stages of dementia.  He needed help with a weekly shop, food preparation and encouragement to take his medication.  Essentially they agreed a piece of business for the third sector to provide this basic support, paid for out of public finance.  There was no discussion of the role of neighbours in helping out.  No exploration about whether they might be able to manage a weekly shop between them, or set up a meal rota, or ensure a daily visit.

Now I don’t think this was a rare one-off.  I think our neighbourhoods are awash with opportunities for local people to engage with each other, to help and be helped, and to learn how to make a real difference to the big and small issues that beset us.

I am not saying that we don’t need specialist public services, of course we do.  But we will have to learn to do the basics for ourselves if we want to make progress.

The challenge is how can the funders possibly engage with a civic group that helps it to do something quite remarkable.  Because standard forms of procurement and project management are hardly conducive.

 

More from John Taylor Gatto

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“I’ve come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us… I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to *prevent* children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.”

 

“It’s absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does…”

 

“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.”

Improving Employability…

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Businesses reading the future of the labour market and feeding employment needs back in to the education system sounds like a great plan.

Except we haven’t yet found a way to do it.

We do not know enough about how the labour market will shape up with enough ‘notice’ to make any real difference to the educational process at all.

And then there is the small matter that education is not all about employability and entrepreneurship.

Few teachers join the education system as a kind of prep school for employers and have an innate suspicion of employers looking for ready made employment ‘fodder’. The vision for education is larger than slotting people into jobs. It is about the realisation of potential. In the heads of many education professionals the two goals of realising potential and developing employability make uncomfortable bed-fellows.

I have been involved in Vocational Education and Training, both on the policy side and in practice for over 25 years. Not one of those 25 years has gone by without similar diagnoses and prescriptions:

  • A stronger role for employers,
  • more business in the curriculum,
  • better specifications of what it means to be employable (whole careers can be developed in this field),
  • reformations of the careers service,
  • more employability projects, internships, mentoring, and so on.

And while our engagement as ‘business people’ may help us to feel like we are doing our part, and there are plenty of awards to be won, in the grand schemes of things it makes very little difference. 20+ years of ‘improving school standards’ and still employers complaining about the product…..

If we are serious about improving the life chances of our young people we need to radically revise the nature of the education process and system, not bolt on another committee.

We need to encourage young people to know themselves, their passions and and their potential (almost impossible when you are asked to turn interest on and off at the call of the school bell).  Instead of trying to take slivers of the real world into school we should do much, much more to get children into adult company in real work and non-work settings, public, private and third sector. It is not just business that needs to be more involved with schools, but adult society in general.  Personally I think that post 14 most young people should spend more time being educated outside the school than in it.

There is an argument to say that the only thing children really learn at school is how to relate to an authoritarian system, either through compliance or defiance.

If we are serious about the potential of all our young people then tinkering with the curriculum and the occasional day of smoothie making is just not going to cut it. We need to re-think how we prepare young people to play full lives in adult society. And as a nation that is a debate that we not seem to have the political will to hold.

How Should We Recognise a Successful Economy?

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Seems to me that everyone thinks a ‘successful economy’ is critical to our future, but what characteristics would a ‘successful economy’ exhibit?

The Ideal?

  • It would exhibit private sector led growth
  • Environmentally sustainable
  • Reducing levels of relative poverty
  • Reducing levels of health inequalities
  • Increasing levels of health and well-being
  • Increasing levels of employment with jobs that are doing ‘good work’ or as Cllr Walshaw suggests ‘dignity of endeavour’
  • Providing opportunities to work based on the culture, skills and passions of people as well as the commercial goals and employability demands of employers
  • It would serve all people – rather than distort them to serve its demands
  • It would provide access to services necessary for all to live a becoming existence
The Current Reality?
  • It would exhibit private sector led growth

That’s it. The wealth created may then be used to build a better society.